Enhancing Iranian EFL Learners’ Descriptive Writing Skill through Genre-based Instruction and Metalinguistic Feedback

Abstract

English language teaching (ELT) writing practitioners have long attempted to improve EFL/ESL learners’ competence in writing with recourse to either instruction or feedback. Likewise, researchers have, to date, mainly focused on either of these treatments to enhance language learners’ composing ability. Which treatment leads to more significant improvements is, however, unclear. Moreover, of the various written genres, the genre of description seems to have been neglected by researchers. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the impact of metalinguistic feedback and scaffolded genre-based instruction through consciousness-raising tasks on EFL learners’ ability to write descriptive essays. To this aim, two groups, feedback group (n = 32) and instruction group (n = 32), participated in the present study. After pretesting the participants’ ability to compose descriptive essays, the researchers provided them with either written metalinguistic explanations on their compositions or genre-based instruction. The participants then took a posttest, the results of which revealed that the instruction group had made more significant improvements.